A Writer's Life

The world, at least our world, seems to be breaking up into small colonies of the saved, as if we were entering a new Dark Age. If so, then perhaps the most important task we can set ourselves from here on out is to sustain, articulate, and preserve through literature the essential human values that early in the evolutionary history of our species distinguished us from our higher primate cousins—loving kindness, protection of the young, the weak, and the elderly, and consciousness of mortality.

Russell Banks;
from Burn This Book